Improving the Talent 100 website user experience

Website UX Improvements

The Talent 100 website UX project began in September 2017 with the following objectives:

To streamline the online path to enrolment, making it easier for students and parents to discover and enrol with us all online.

To increase qualified leads through more relevant content and better SEO.

To better communicate the key elements of Talent 100’s Teaching & Learning system through shorter blocks of text and iconography. This will provide the prospective customer a better understanding of where their money is being spent – rather than just an hourly rate.

To better communicate the outcomes of attending Talent 100 (not just the features).

To provide new landing pages where the prospective customer can learn and enrol about their subject without leaving the page (we currently lose 50% of users at each click).

To deploy an online enrolment process for each subject, centre and grade (year level) so our customers can enrol at Talent 100 online with minimum effort.

To increase website traffic through an increase in pages utilising relevant keywords such as ‘maths’, ‘tutoring’, ‘techniques’, ‘chatswood’ etc

Reduce ‘clicks to conversion’ and increase lead generation.

A better, more optimised online enrolment form where the user can ‘shop’ their classes/subjects while automatically seeing the prices and discounts updated on the side of the page.

Integration of a customer account with the online enrolment process so customers re-enrolling do not need to re-enter their details but can check and edit details so they are up-to-date.

Integration of a customer account with the online enrolment process so the site does not create a new account within Salesforce with every new online enrolment causing extra work through merging and deleting.

As with all of our existing projects the first step was to research the customer and gain a better understanding of their behaviours, needs and goals.

By gaining a better understanding of our customer’s needs, behaviours and goals we will be able to improve the site architecture and content through a better and more concise communication of a value proposition that resonates with them – providing successful outcomes for the customer and Talent 100.

Who are our customers?

After 15 customer/user interviews we were starting to hear the same issues and problems repeat themselves

After reaching out to our customers through user interviews and surveys we were able to put together valid user personas outlining the needs, wants and pain points of our customers.

Our personas were validated with online surveys and interviews

With this understanding we were then able to align these needs, wants and pain points through a Value Proposition Design Canvas we were able to align Talent 100’s offering with our customer’s. This helped us define the key points where our offering converges with our Customer’s needs.

Using Strategyzer’s value proposition canvas

Digging into the historical usage data we were able to find many interesting and actionable insights. Our SEO was poor due to the website being built without considering the customer and what they wanted. The copy of the website was one “sales pitch” after another and no planned user journey or funnel.

30% of users would land on the home page while 70% would land on the ATAR calculator page.

Digging into our website traffic

At the same time as digging through our own data to uncover userflows and friction on the user journey I began looking into the data of our competitors. As well as uncovering insights, trends and outdated mindsets that provide you with ﬁrsthand knowledge of the good and bad user experiences provided by our competitors.

Using the analytics tool Semrush.com we were able to monitor and track our competitors online usage

After discovering what our customers were wanting (through the quantitative and qualitative research) we found that the best strategy was to increase relevant content through the creation of webpages that provided information our users/prospective customers were looking for – and our competitors were finding.

This strategy would not only remove a lot of friction for our prospective customers as they searched through our website – but it would bring much more traffic to the website through organic search – which provided us with 80% of our traffic.

The User Journey across the website would point out major stumbling blocks to the user

Following a lean and agile approach to UX I felt that by designing a single page template that could be easily replicated and dynamically populated by the company’s CRM software (Salesforce) and then tested through Google’s Optimize tool we could create over 100 new pages with keyword and user specific content which would be designed to convert by optimizing the online enrolment process and increasing the conversion rate.

High Resolution Mockup built to be passed onto front end developer

By providing our users with subject, course and location specific content we will increase visibility and traffic for prospective customers as they look for year + subject + location content.

New Online Enrolment with side ‘cart’ feature.

Based on our research I set out to improve upon the usability by optimising the online enrolment form. The existing online enrolment form had a very low conversion rate due to the user having to get to step 3 of 4 before they were able to see the cost and discounts.

The mid-resolution prototype was built quickly using Adobe XD and the test URL was sent around the team for testing and feedback. After making minor changes the UI was built within a PSD file and sent to the developers to quote on API development (if needed) and building within our existing wordpress site.

At the time of writing the project is being put into production. After launch we will be using A/B testing along with other monitoring other metrics so we can improve on the design through rapid iterations.